Global Coal Plant Tracker Ownership Review
Global Energy Monitor (GEM) is in the process of reviewing ownership information in the Global Coal Plant Tracker (GCPT). This work includes formalizing new "owner" (formerly "sponsor") and "parent" definitions.
Parent company criteria & China review
In the first half of 2022, researchers reviewed the low-level owners for about 90% of coal-fired power stations in China to identify the official company names in Chinese. Researchers didn't revisit names for certain power stations or proposals, such as those that were already cancelled or retired.
GEM then used these Chinese names to do automated searches of Qichacha (QCC) enterprise registration and ownership data to get the shareholders and used code to trace the ownership structures and assign ownership shares to parent companies.
As of July 2022, GEM defined certain criteria for parent companies as the stopping point along a particular ownership branch:
- A central enterprise as defined by SASAC or the Ministry of Finance;
- A listed company, as defined in QCC (that is, it reportedly has publicly traded stock);
- A company owned (at least partially) by a government agency;
- A company owned (at least partially) by an individual.
In the case of companies owned at least partially by government agencies or individuals, GEM attributed those ownership shares to the company, rather than to the government agencies or individuals.
About the July 2022 and January 2023 GCPT releases
The July 2022 and July 2023 Global Coal Plant Tracker releases include GEM's initial findings. An index of the owner names from QCC in Chinese is available in the January 2023 Global Ownership of Coal Plants (MW) Summary Table.
Please note that in the latest release, certain owners and parents are listed in more than one way as our review work is still underway. For example, the National Energy Investment Group may be listed twice. Certain English and Chinese owner names also have issues, such as missing spaces, stemming from QCC's data. In addition, the information in the Global Coal Plant Tracker spreadsheet and Global Coal Plant Tracker wikis is in the process of being streamlined.
GEM will continue its review of China and non-China owners in the coming year.
Questions or feedback?
If you have corrections, feedback, ideas, or requests related to the current criteria for parent companies – or GEM's ownership data more generally – please contact the Global Coal Plant Tracker's Project Manager.
We look forward to hearing from you as we continue improving our tools together in 2023.
